… in 1946 was a Thursday. How do I know this? Why, I asked WolframAlpha. It’s the kind of thing it knows.
It was also the day in 1936 when the Spanish Civil War began as General Franco led an uprising of army troops based in North Africa.
A wilderness of mirrors
From today’s NYTimes..
It is an axiom that “on the Internet nobody knows that you are a dog.”
By the same token, it is all but impossible to know whether you are from North Korea or South Korea.
That puzzle is plaguing law enforcement investigators in several nations who are now hunting for the authors of a small but highly publicized Internet denial-of-service attack that briefly knocked offline the Web sites of some United States and South Korean government agencies and companies.
The attack, which began over the Fourth of July weekend and continued into the next week, led to South Korean accusations that the attack had been conducted by North Korean military or intelligence agents, possibly in retaliation for new United Nations sanctions. American officials quickly cautioned that despite sensational news media coverage, the attacks were no different from similar challenges government agencies face on a daily basis.
Cyberwarfare specialists cautioned this week that the Internet was effectively a “wilderness of mirrors,” and that attributing the source of cyberattacks and other kinds of exploitation is difficult at best and sometimes impossible. Despite the initial assertions and rumors that North Korea was behind the attacks and slight evidence that the programmer had some familiarity with South Korean software, the consensus of most computer security specialists is that the attackers could be located anywhere in the world.
“It would be incredibly difficult to prove that North Korea was involved in this,” said Amrit Williams, chief technology officer for Bigfix, a computer security management firm. “There are no geographic borders for the Internet. I can reach out and touch people everywhere.”
This is the back-story to the post by Mark Anderson that I blogged earlier in the week.
Psion founder backs new investigative journalism bureau
An interesting attempt to address the problem of who will fund investigative reporting if the newspapers go bust. According to this Press Gazette story,
A major new journalism project that aims to be the "counterweight" to the perceived decline of investigative reporting has secured £2m in start-up funding, it was announced today.
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism will launch in London in the coming months and claims to be the first organisation of its kind in the UK dedicated to independent public interest journalism.
It will hire a managing editor, two or three reporters and will also fund freelance investigators and researchers. Its aim is to dig out – and then sell – the stories that many news organisations say they can no longer afford to cover in-house.
The not-for-profit bureau has been given the go-ahead as a result of the “extraordinary generosity”of a single donor – the Potter Foundation – which has made the £2m grant.
The foundation is run by David Potter, who made his fortune as the founder, chief executive and now chairman of hand-held computer manufacturer Psion, and his wife Elaine – a former Sunday Times journalist who now chairs the board of the Centre for Investigative Journalism.
I hope it works. Wonder what the business model is.
1.5 billion App downloads don’t count — says Google
From FT.com Tech Blog.
Apple customers may have downloaded 1.5bn applications from its AppStore in the past year for their iPhones and iPod touches, but the service does not represent the future for the mobile industry, according to Google.
Vic Gundotra, Google Engineering vice president and developer evangelist, told the Mobilebeat conference in San Francisco on Thursday that the web had won and users of mobile phones would get their information and entertainment from browsers in future.
He claimed that even Google was not rich enough to support all of the different mobile platforms from Apple’s AppStore to those of the BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Android and the many variations of the Nokia platform.
“What we clearly see happening is a move to incredibly powerful browsers,” he said.
“Many, many applications can be delivered through the browser and what that does for our costs is stunning.
“We believe the web has won and over the next several years, the browser, for economic reasons almost, will become the platform that matters and certainly that’s where Google is investing.”
Well, as Mandy Rice-Davies said…
Rotten Apple
It’s a rough world out there – as this Reuters report reminds us.
NEW YORK Reuters – Shares of Palm Inc fell more than 3 percent on Thursday after Apple Inc closed a loophole in iTunes that had allowed the music management software to be synchronized with Palms Pre phone.
On Wednesday, Apple released an update to iTunes — which complements the iPod and iPhone devices — meant to fix software bugs and “addresses an issue with verification of Apple devices.”
“It also disables devices falsely pretending to be iPods, including the Palm Pre. As we’ve said before, newer versions of Apples iTunes software may no longer provide syncing functionality with unsupported digital media players,” said Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr.
Don’t you just love that phrase “addresses an issue”?
So it may be some consolation to Palm stockholders that Apple is about to get it in the neck from Microsoft.
Microsoft is planning to open the first of its planned retail stores next to existing Apple stores this fall.
Kevin Turner, Microsoft’s Chief Operating Officer, told partners the news during his Worldwide Partner Conference keynote on July 15. A number of attendees tweeted Turner’s words immediately.
Microsoft officials announced in February that Microsoft was planning to open retail stores but have offered few details since that time as to what the stores would look like or when they’d open. I did hear from some Softies that the stores wouldn’t be clones of Apple’s, and that they’d be more showcases than actual retail outlets.
Turner told Partner show attendees that the knowledge Microsoft gained from running the stores would be “shared with partners.”
According to partners attending the conference, Turner said Microsoft wouldn’t be imitating Apple; it would be innovating with the new stores. Earlier this year, Microsoft officials said the stores would be more about building Microsoft’s consumer brand than distribution.
Microsoft hired David Porter, a former Dreamworks Animation and Wal-mart exec, as Corporate Vice President of Retail Stores earlier this year.
Why NetBooks thrived
Good FT column by John Gapper
If the netbook, now defined as a mini-notebook with a screen of up to 10 inches, costing between $300 and $600, weighing two or three pounds and usually running on Intel’s Atom chip, is so appealing, why did it take so long to arrive?
One answer is that US companies made a mistake. “They thought that the performance was too low and people would not be interested,” says Willy Shih, a professor at Harvard Business School who is in Taiwan this week to research the netbook phenomenon further…
Bing making headway?
The NYT thinks that it might be making an impact.
SAN FRANCISCO — In late May, Microsoft unveiled Bing, its new Internet search engine, in front of an audience of skeptics: technology executives and other digerati who had gathered near San Diego for an industry conference.
To that crowd, Microsoft’s efforts to take on Google and Yahoo in the search business had become something of a laughingstock, and for good reason. Microsoft’s repeated efforts to build a credible search engine had fallen flat, and the company’s market share was near its low.
Six weeks later, Bing has earned Microsoft something the company’s search efforts have lacked: respect.
As a result, analysts say, the once-dubious prospect that Microsoft could shake up the dynamics of the search business, which is worth $12 billion in the United States alone, has become just a bit more likely…
I hope this hunch is correct. The world needs some serious competition for Google.
Firefox and State
From the transcript of Hilary Clinton’s recent open meeting with State Department staff…
MS. GREENBERG: Okay. Our next question comes from Jim Finkle:
Can you please let the staff use an alternative web browser called Firefox? I just – (applause) – I just moved to the State Department from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and was surprised that State doesn’t use this browser. It was approved for the entire intelligence community, so I don’t understand why State can’t use it. It’s a much safer program. Thank you. (Applause.)
SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, apparently, there’s a lot of support for this suggestion. (Laughter.) I don’t know the answer. Pat, do you know the answer? (Laughter.)
UNDER SECRETARY KENNEDY: The answer is at the moment, it’s an expense question. We can —
QUESTION: It’s free. (Laughter.)
UNDER SECRETARY KENNEDY: Nothing is free. (Laughter.) It’s a question of the resources to manage multiple systems. It is something we’re looking at. And thanks to the Secretary, there is a significant increase in the 2010 budget request that’s pending for what is called the Capital Investment Fund, by which we fund our information technology operations. With the Secretary’s continuing pushing, we’re hoping to get that increase in the Capital Investment Fund. And with those additional resources, we will be able to add multiple programs to it.
Yes, you’re correct; it’s free, but it has to be administered, the patches have to be loaded. It may seem small, but when you’re running a worldwide operation and trying to push, as the Secretary rightly said, out FOBs and other devices, you’re caught in the terrible bind of triage of trying to get the most out that you can, but knowing you can’t do everything at once.
SECRETARY CLINTON: So we will try to move toward that. When the White House was putting together the stimulus package, we were able to get money that would be spent in the United States, which was the priority, for IT and upgrading our system and expanding its reach. And this is a very high priority for me, and we will continue to push the envelope on it. I mean, Pat is right that everything does come with some cost, but we will be looking to try to see if we can extend it as quickly as possible.
It raises another issue with me. If we’re spending money on things that are not productive and useful, let us know, because there are tens of thousands of people who are using systems and office supplies and all the rest of it. The more money we can save on stuff that is not cutting edge, the more resources we’ll have to shift to do things that will give us more tools. I mean, it sounds simplistic, but one of the most common suggestions on the sounding board was having better systems to utilize supplies, paper supplies – I mean, office supplies – and be more conscious of their purchasing and their using.
And it reminded me of what I occasionally sometimes do, which I call shopping in my closet, which means opening doors and seeing what I actually already have, which I really suggest to everybody, because it’s quite enlightening. (Laughter.) And so when you go to the store and you buy, let’s say, peanut butter and you don’t realize you’ve got two jars already at the back of the shelf – I mean, that sounds simplistic, but help us save money on stuff that we shouldn’t be wasting money on, and give us the chance to manage our resources to do more things like Firefox, okay?
Yeah.
How to Start The Next War
Regular readers will know that I’m more concerned about Cyberwarfare than most of the mass media (see e.g. here). It seems that Mark Anderson shares that concern. Extract from an interesting post on his blog about reports that North Korea has been playing games in Cyberspace:
Cyber attack has moved from nuisance, to the first, and often the decisive, act of war. Can a country afford to ignore or belittle a major cyber attack? No. There is too much likelihood it is the first step in a cascade that will lead to missiles, tanks and soldiers.
I don’t mean to imply that the current attacks on the U.S., if as amateurish as we are told, are cause for going to war. But if you switch the perspectives, you see the problem: if this is NK doing its best, launched simultaneously with seven missiles pointed at the U.S., they are not just being devilishly cute. They are risking our interpretation of their mischief as a real act of war.
Indeed, I would submit that the world community is now at that stage in its development of, and dependence upon, computer systems and nets, that a well-documented and clearly sourced cyber attack would be adequate grounds, in the Security Council of the U.N., for going to war…
Africa — as seen by Richard Dowden
Informative and useful review by DianeC of Africa:altered states, ordinary miracles by Richard Dowden.
There are lots of things about this book that I liked. One was learning something new on every page. It’s a great read, combining vivid reportage with intelligent analysis. Another was the author’s refusal to generalize. Almost every chapter is about a specific country, or sub-national region, or ethnic group, or village. The stories are used to illustrate wider points, but no reader could emerge from this making bland generalizations. Any of the chapters makes a great, concise introduction to an individual country’s history and political landscape.
However, there are two quite powerful generalizations that emerge, not from being chapter subjects, but from the way they crop up in every specific example throughout the book. One is the utterly corrosive and pervasive corruption. Like Martin Meredith in The State of Africa, Dowden thinks this has its origins in colonialism, in the expectation formed by colonial rule that the state steals from the people. Between two and fourteen times the amount paid to African countries in official aid has been sent overseas to private bank accounts in London and Switzerland, he suggests. (And here’s another charge to lay at the door of the financial services industry, the bankers for whom all money is welcome, no matter what its provenance.) But unlike Meredith, he firmly blames current political leaders in Africa for betraying the hopes and promise of liberation with every bribe they take or profit they skim. In this he is in harmony with a growing chorus of critics of everyday politics in so many Africa countries – including, of course, Barack Obama.
A second theme which emerges unannounced is the damage being caused by the aid industry – and here too Dowden is adding his authoritative voice to other aid critics. This ranges from his critique of the way the agencies feed the image of helpless, starving Africa to ensure they can raise funds to pay themselves and ensure their activities continue (p7) to drawing attention to their perverse role in supporting those who committed the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 (p248)…